Languagle #68: Kikuyu
Andũ matarĩ ndundu mahũragwo na njũgũma ĩmwe
Andu matari ndundu mahuragwo na njuguma imwe
"People with no agreement between them are beaten with a single club."
What it means
People who are divided are easy to defeat. If they cannot agree among themselves, a single enemy with a single club can beat them all, one by one. The Kikuyu version of 'united we stand, divided we fall'.
How to say it
an-do ma-ta-re ndoon-doo ma-ho-ra-gwo na njo-go-ma e-mweh
Ũ sounds like the o in 'go', and ĩ like the e in 'they'. Kikuyu is tonal, so keep the syllables even.
Word by word
- Andũ an-do: people
- matarĩ ma-ta-re: who don't have
- ndundu ndoon-doo: agreement, a council
- mahũragwo ma-ho-ra-gwo: are beaten
- na na: with
- njũgũma njo-go-ma: a club
- ĩmwe e-mweh: one
Where it was written down
A traditional proverb, in Kikuyu a thimo, passed down by word of mouth. It comes from G. Barra's 1000 Kikuyu Proverbs, first published in 1939.
Similar sayings
- Kazakh: Бір жеңнен қол шығар, бір жағадан бас шығар. Let the hands come out of one sleeve and the heads out of one collar. (Languagle #5)
How to recognise Kikuyu
Kikuyu's giveaways are ĩ and ũ, an i and a u with a tilde on top, which very few languages use. Otherwise it looks like other Bantu languages, with words built from prefixes like mũ-, a- and ma-, and with letter pairs like nd, ng and mb at the start of words.
About the Kikuyu language
Kikuyu, or Gĩkũyũ, is a Bantu language spoken by around 8 million people in central Kenya, in the highlands around Mount Kenya and in Nairobi. The Kikuyu are Kenya's largest ethnic group. The novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o famously gave up writing fiction in English in the late 1970s to write in Gĩkũyũ instead. It uses the Latin alphabet, with ĩ and ũ marking two extra vowel sounds.